About the Film

Transcontinental Railroad

The remarkable story of greed, innovation and gritty determination to build a railroad connecting California to the East. Peopled by the ingenious entrepreneurs whose unscrupulous financing got the line laid, the brilliant engineers who charted the railroad's course and hurdled the geological obstacles in its way, the armies of workers who labored relentlessly on the enterprise, and the Native Americans whose lives were destroyed in its wake, The Transcontinental Railroad reveals both why the railroad was built and how it would shape the nation, while shedding light on the politics and culture of mid-19th century America.

United States Digital Map Library: Indian Land Cessionshttp://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/mapsSixty-seven maps from an 1899 Bureau of American Ethnology report to the Smithsonian Institution show the land ceded to the United States by native peoples. USGenWeb Archives has provided this useful set of map images and promises to add an index to identify which treaties ceded each land parcel in the future.

California State Railroad Museumhttp://www.csrmf.orgVisit the Governor Stanford, pioneering locomotive of the Central Pacific Railroad, or dip into the Museum's extensive archival materials.

The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museumhttp://www.cprr.orgScan the massive amounts of primary source material compiled by this online museum dedicated to the transcontinental railroad's construction.

Reading Historic Photographs: Pawnee Indianshttp://php.indiana.edu/~tkavanag/phothana.htmlIndiana University's Thomas W. Kavanagh analyzes photographs of Pawnee men and women, known for their friendliness to the transcontinental railroad's builders.